Opening visual spectacular

voice than Schütz’s devotional settings in which it was difficult to hear the German texts. Juxtaposed with Monteverdi’s settings of Armato il cor and Zefiro torna, which again provided inspiration to Schütz, gave historic connection.

Outstanding in both were Mulroy and fellow tenor Gwilym Bowen, their voices beautifully blended and astonishingly together in waging war. CAROL MAIN not the only piece of fiction or biography to describe how this journey has often been made by painfully young children and teenagers, her story of Afghan brothers Aryan and Kabir, and their twoyear struggle to reach London, is certainly one of the most poignant.

Yet when the Edinburgh Festival first commissioned the Glasgow-based Vox Motus company to create a theatre version of the tale, I doubt whether anyone involved could have fully imagined the exercise in inspired and passionate miniaturism that takes over Church Hill Theatre Studio during this Festival, in complete contrast to the main-stage spectacle of Vox Motus’s 2015 Festival show, Dragon.

In the darkened theatre, each audience member sits alone in a booth, listening through headphones, while the story rolls before us in a series of exquisitely-crafted tiny installations, as 15-yearold Aryan and his little brother, only 8, brave the dangers of the Mediterranean, or the ultimate agony of the jungle camp at Calais.

The story is in some ways a simple one, told with an edge of gentle tragedy in Oliver Emanuel’s text, and voiced, in the recorded soundtrack, by a fine team of nine actors.

Yet the poignant beauty of the tiny puppets, and the sheer imaginative vividness of the world they inhabit, engraves this exquisite show on the memory, shaming the very idea of a “refugee threat” with its profound sense of the vulnerability of those small travellers.

Theatre, installation art, or something else entirely, Flight tells its tale with a passion reflected in every detail of its tiny artworks; and with all the care and tenderness for which Aryan and Kabir long, but which they are so

0 Little Mermaid is part cabaret, part fairytale indeed, it shows how the two spheres overlap. In a moment of anxiety, Meow Meow fears that her entire carnivalesque performance career has not been a mission to share beauty, laughter and understanding but instead an absurd, brutally denied, almost to the last. JOYCE MCMILLAN The Studio JJJJ Martin Creed’s artworks – not least his Turner Prizewinning installation the lights going on and off (as they surely did) – have intrigued and bemused people in equal measure.

It seems entirely possible that his late night EIF residency, the equally accurately described Words and Music, could elicit the same response.

But then Creed himself comes across as somewhat bemused and words are his way of making sense of feelings. Words and Music complicates things a bit for Creed but does make for a more ramshackle spectacle: maybe she’s been “not saving but clowning”.

This show proves once more that the two are gloriously compatible. BEN WALTERS entertaining show for the audience.

There is a punk purity to his playing, usually curt chords on a chiming 12-string guitar, and his rudimentary, repetitive lyrics delivered in a naïve whiny tone.

If this doesn’t sound like much of a performance, don’t worry – there is much sharp, witty and whimsical food for thought in his seemingly haphazard method, ranging from his resolutely nonmuso analysis of the relationship between words and music, the defined and the abstract, to the companion pieces, Let Them In and Border Control.

The former is his lo-fi indie take on an ancient folk blues, while the latter is little more than a chant, which chops away at the title to the very last syllable.

In Creed’s engaging world, less usually means more. FIONA SHEPHERD Mark-anthony Turnage’s opera Greek – a ballsy star turn at the 1988 EIF – has resurfaced almost 30 years on in a new production by Joe Hill-gibbons, which has fresh thoughts to offer.

The underlying thrust of Greek, based on Steven Berkoff ’s play, remains the same: a punk-fuelled childof-the-80s reworking of the Oedipus story, in which London East Ender, hard Eddy, amid a backdrop of anti-thatcherite anarchy and unrest, walks out on his adopted parents, gets caught up in a vicious riot, unwittingly kills his real father, then settles in a grotty cafe with a girl who turns out to be his mother.

The real clincher in this Opera Ventures/scottish Opera co-production is Hillgibbons’ focus on psychology rather than epoch. Yes, there are neo-punk elements in what are essentially postweill showtime numbers – how could there not be, given the foul-mouthed language and Turnage’s “f*** you” music?

However, any actual violence is confined to Johannes Schütz’s minimal set design – a plain white revolving wall that awakens only to symbolic live projections of greasy spoon breakfast ingredients (including maggots), slapped on in the brutal fashion of an evolving Jackson Pollock canvas. Food for thought.

Hill-gibbons tells us that running away won’t alter fate. As Eddy, Scottish Opera Emerging Artist Alex Otterburn makes a convincingly stubborn case – feisty yet open to sympathy – ably supported by the incisive multiple characterisations of Andrew Stone, Allison Cook and (an occasionally hoarse) Susan Bullock.

Under conductor Stuart Stratford on Saturday, the truculent score took time to throw its most vicious punches, but when it did, the air turned blue.

I did miss the visual inyour-face shock factor, but, perversely, I did like the fact we found lots to laugh about. KEN WALTON